Ayman Tarouni stood queuing by a rubbish heap at the side of a Tripoli road waiting to pay for a kilo of potatoes. It was the first and only food he could buy for a week, and the going rate was four times what he was used to.
This was life after Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in late August; a time of empty, foreboding streets, no running water, patchy electricity and crackling gunfire. After the rigid order of the past 42 years, nothing in Libya seemed to be certain anymore.
“I am not worried,” Tarouni said at the time. “This will all get better. The people will be patient for as long as they need to be. Three, four, even six months. Anything to get rid of Gaddafi.”
Within a fortnight, Mr Tarouni’s optimism seemed well placed – at least at the services level. The Great Man-Made River, which supplies mains water to all Libya’s urban centres, had been turned on again after engineers fixed the damage to sub stations done by the dictator’s fleeing forces.
Across the board, things were improving daily. Electricity was running 24/7, the Tunisian border had been re-opened to trade, and shops that had been shuttered for up to six months were starting to open throughout Tripoli. White-shirted policemen were returning to work, and refuse was being collected by several garbage trucks commandeered by well-intentioned locals.
“The good thing is that no day since he left is worse than the one before,” says Mohammed al-Gheriyani, a policeman who had returned to work at the newly renamed Martyr’s Square near the capital’s port. “All the NTC, [the interim government] needs to do is make sure it stays that way.”
LIFE AFTER GADDAFI
Yet rebuilding Libyan society after four decades of Gaddafi will clearly require far more than getting civic services sorted. Even now, less than two months since Gaddafi’s ignominous departure from Tripoli, the most instructive project in the new Libya is how to allocate power.
Enormous effort is being put into how to carve up the spoils – and for good reason.
A ruling class in post-Gaddafi Libya is now trying to take shape amid a fog of confusion. There is no shortage of former functionaries scrambling to distance themselves from Gaddafi. Even supporting acts who stayed with the regime until its dying days are now vying for lead roles as technocrats, or assistants to foreign media. For the most part the regime men have been embraced by the NTC, the interim National Transitional Council, a nascent body of former exiles and life-long dissidents who have staked a lead claim in shaping the direction of the country from here.
“Not everybody who now supports us hated Gaddafi, and we acknowledge that,” says an NTC spokesman. “We need to make sure that these people are given a stake and a reason to support the new administration. We need to take them with us.”
Another NTC official, speaking to Emerging Markets without clearance from senior leaders, recognizes the difficulties of embracing Gaddafi supporters but explains further: “We acknowledge what has been said about these people, and that is that they usually had little choice but to behave like a loyal servant. Dissent was punished severely under Gaddafi.”
SHOWING SEVERAL FACES
Like life in all totalitarian states, Libyans learned under the rule of the erratic tyrant to live with several faces. Speaking your mind was not wise unless your view happened to accord with the official narrative. Civic freedoms were strictly limited, and competing viewpoints close to non-existent.
“If you had asked me two months ago whether I was with the regime, sure, I would have said so,” says Ahmed al-Dersi, a former government minder for the foreign press who was sent to escort correspondents staying at Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel earlier this year. “I would not have known whether you had been paid by the regime to spy on me. I could not trust anyone.”
There are endless numbers of people in Tripoli now who are being forced to vouch for their bona fides. Many say they were always rebels-in-waiting, who maintained a facade of loyalty because they knew nothing else.
Unity has been largely artificial here for at least several generations. Society was bound together by a cult of personality, rigidly enforced by functionaries who had often enriched themselves courtesy of the regime.
“Putting a blanket ban on these people playing a constructive role in life now would be disastrous and is something that the NTC are very much aware of,” says a senior western diplomat in Tripoli.
The de-Baathification experiment of post-Saddam Iraq is often pointed to here as a blueprint for how not to manage a society that loses its strongman. “To get rid of anyone here who helped the regime would leave no one to run the country and create an insurgency far bigger than anything Iraq had to deal with,” says the NTC official.
ASSUMING POWER
But even after the collective sigh of relief that has followed the collapse of the regime, first establishing and then securing unity remains a pressing concern. De-Baathification seems sure not to be repeated – at least not on a large scale. However, an Iraq-like bid for tribal buy-in to the new society is a certainty.
Libya has 140 tribes, and society is rigidly ordered along tribal lines. Under Gaddafi, the tribal role was mostly confined to local areas and kept away from broader affairs of state, but tribal leaders now clearly want much more of a say in things.
Above the tribes is another layer of competing interests, the NTC itself. The NTC was formed in Benghazi and acted as the political face of the rebels who drove Gaddafi’s forces from the east of the country. Its representatives are technically split into three groups, representing the east, west and centre of the country, but it remains heavily represented by and associated with Benghazi and the rebels of the east, rather than Tripoli. Consequently, it faces a challenge in winning over rebel fighters from southern, central and western regions, many of whom feel that their central roles in forcing Gaddafi from Tripoli should be rewarded.
The western rebels, who mainly hail from the Nasufa mountains and the flatlands spilling towards the Tunisian border, were the first to ride into Tripoli, early on August 21. It was a triumph that brought with it a sense of entitlement.
The central rebels, who come mainly from Misrata and its surrounds, also want a significant say in how the spoils are carved up. They fought the most protracted and bloody battles of the war and took the most casualties. In the early days of Tripoli’s liberation, the men from Misrata did much of the mopping-up work, chasing the remnants of the Gaddafi Brigades through the southern suburbs and south past the airport. When Gaddafi and his family fled south through Bani Walid and, in some cases beyond, the Misrata rebels blocked any getaway routes to the north and west and prepared to enter the town to oust those who stayed loyal to them.
That leaves the rebels of the east, who gave the whole rebel movement its intellectual grunt in the early days and did the legwork with the international community to win recognition as an alternative administration.
The 33-member NTC council, many of whom hail from Benghazi or cities to the east, clearly has designs on a decisive role in the affairs of state and is busily moving itself into former Gaddafi villas across the road from the Rixos Hotel, or into the E270-a-night Corinthia Hotel overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The trappings of power clearly matter here. However, the NTC leadership says it is determined not to replicate the largesse of the Gaddafi era, or another practice to which the former regime is inextricably tied – vengeance.
The NTC has appointed Abdul Hakim Belhaj, a rebel commander who played a lead role in the battle for Tripoli, as commander of the Tripoli Military Council, and charged him with restoring order among competing rebel factions within the city. He has publicly preached a conciliatory tone.
“Only those who played vital roles in persecuting the people will be chased down,” he tells Emerging Markets. “I say to those people that they will be fairly tried, and we will not treat them the way that they treated us.”
He goes on to demonstrate this claim: in early September, he was receiving phone calls from one of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, who was discussing surrender, but first seeking assurances that he and his family would not be mistreated. “I told him he had nothing to fear from me and that we would treat him with honour,” says Belhaj. “He was supposed to call me the next day at 1pm, but he didn’t.”
BELHAJ’S ISLAMIST INTENT?
Of all the figures to emerge in post-Gaddafi Libya so far, Belhaj seems to be the most polarizing. A committed Islamist, documents found at an abandoned government office building in Tripoli earlier this month appear to confirm that he was arrested by the CIA in Bangkok in 2004 and renditioned to Gaddafi’s Libya, allegedly with the help of Britain’s MI6. Belhaj’s loyal officers and many of his functionaries are leading members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was committed to ousting Gaddafi and replacing his tyrannical socialist republic with an Islamic state.
But with the first goal achieved, many NTC members remain suspicious that Belhaj and his group will now press for the second. NTC leader Mahmoud Jibril stated in mid-September that the new Libya would not become an Islamic state, but would instead be a “democratic state with civic institutions”.
Wary of the capacity for Belhaj’s Islamists to capitalize on military successes, Jibril was trying to place all military groups under the control of the NTC. “He wants to subsume us,” says a source close to Belhaj. “People used to say that [former Palestinian National Authority president Yasser] Arafat could never transition from revolutionary to statesman. Jibril is neither.”
Jockeying for power in such a vacuum seems inevitable. And indeed, robustly asserting demands is an essential part of the democratic process that Europe and the US have been championing for Libya. However, there is a sense that the current clashes are not so much about ideas and interests, but ideologies.
The military leadership counters that it will not cede control to a body that is unelected and has not played a lead role in getting Libya to the point it has reached now. “It’s a political process, that’s all it is,” says the NTC official. “This is new to most people, and you don’t need to worry about it, yet.”
HOME AFFAIRS
For now, though, the power plays are not bothering regular Libyans. Contacted a week after he bought his over-priced bag of potatoes, Tarouni said he was feeling even more confident than when he first spoke to Emerging Markets.
“The air tastes different for most people,” he said. “We feel lighter and freer. The fuel queues are down to 20 minutes, compared to five days, the banks are open, and there is food in the shops. The people don’t care about the rest for now. The real stuff for them is what happens behind their [own four] walls. The politics is down the road.”